Is there any encouragement from belonging to Christ? Any comfort from his love? Any fellowship together in the Spirit? Are your hearts tender and compassionate? Then make me truly happy by agreeing wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another, and working together with one mind and purpose.
(Philippians 2:1–2)
Dr Victor Frankl, the bold, courageous Jew who became a prisoner during the Holocaust, endured years of indignity and humiliation by the Nazis before he was finally liberated. At the beginning of his ordeal, he was marched into a Gestapo courtroom. His captors had taken away his home and family, his cherished freedom, his possessions, even his watch and wedding ring.
They had shaved his head and stripped his clothing off his body. There he stood before the German high command, under the glaring lights being interrogated and falsely accused. He was destitute, a helpless pawn in the hands of brutal, prejudiced, sadistic men. He had nothing. No, that isn’t true. He suddenly realised there was one thing no one could ever take from him—just one. Do you know what it was?
Dr Frankl realised he still had the power to choose his own attitude. No matter what anyone would ever do to him or regardless of what the future held for him, the attitude choice was his to make. Bitterness or forgiveness. To give up or to go on. Hatred or hope. Determination to endure or the paralysis of self-pity.
Words can never adequately convey the incredible impact of our attitude toward life. The longer I live, the more convinced I become that life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you respond to it.
This may shock you, but I believe the single most significant decision I can make on a day-to-day basis is my choice of attitude. It is more important than my past, my education, my bankroll, my successes or failures, fame or pain, what other people think of me or say about me, my circumstances, or my position. Attitude is what keeps me going or cripples my progress. It alone fuels my fire or assaults my hope. When my attitudes are right, there’s no barrier too high, no valley too deep, no dream too extreme, no challenge too great for me.
Yet we must admit that we spend more of our time concentrating and fretting over the things that can’t be changed than we do giving attention to the one that remains, our choice of attitude. Stop and think about some of the things that suck up our attention and energy, all of them inescapable (and occasionally demoralising).
Taken from Strengthening Your Grip by Charles R. Swindoll. Copyright © 2015 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Worthy Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
